


your words on my skin are my denunciation

by evocates



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Break the Cuties, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:51:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5450690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/pseuds/evocates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where soulmates have each other’s first words to them marked on their skins but little else had changed, Jean Valjean and Javert are fated for each other. </p><p>Their first meeting happened in Toulon prison.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jean Valjean

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kikibug13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kikibug13/gifts).



> Written for kikibug13 as a prequel of sorts for our Soulmates AU RP for JVJ. Because there are a lot of Soulmates AUs out there for this fandom, but practically none for this pairing.

It was winter: the gardens were dead, and tree pruners must turn towards woodcutting to make a living.

There were forests surrounding Faverolles, but most were owned by the gentry who lived in their mansions near the village. What right had a single man to own a forest, one might ask, but though the Revolution was but a few years ago, poor woodcutters so far North of Paris did not ask these questions. What need had the wretched such as they for these things, after all? Questions did not put food into the mouths of their children.

So tree pruners turned woodcutters walked two miles southeast towards the border between Faverolles and the nearby village of Auriac. 

Jean Valjean was fourteen years old. He had shoulders that, though thin, were already broadened through hard labour. His knuckles were rough, calluses on his fingertips thick. He could not read.

“Cut only the branches,” Jean Valjean’s father said to him, repeating advice that had been told at least a dozen times before. “The wood grows back faster tha’ way, and we’d have wood fer the next year.”

Halfway up a tree, Jean Valjean nodded. He raised his axe—

And immediately dropped it when unexpected flames licked his arm.

“Ow!”

“Careful!” his father scolded, having barely dodged the axe. He picked the tool up, swinging it onto his shoulder. “The metal’d blunt like tha’, then we’d have no wood to sell ta pay the blacksmith.” 

Jean Valjean was not listening. He pulled up his sleeve. The cold bit his skin, but he barely noticed it when he saw the dark ink appearing on his skin, winding around his elbow.

He grinned. Looking down, he met his father’s eyes.

“I got me words, Pa!”

“Well,” his father said, sounding cross. “Can you read ‘em?”

There were two sentences Jean Valjean knew how to read: “You look like you need some help, ma’am,” on his mother’s wrist; “I can handle meself, sir,” on his father’s. He squinted at the ink on his arm. He could not read it, but perhaps that was only because the skin was too red.

Slipping from his perch, he dropped onto the ground, landing on the balls of his feet like a cat. He picked up a handful of snow, chilling his hand before rubbing it all over his arm. The sudden chill made him shiver, but he ignored it, waiting for the redness to subside.

When it did, he sighed. “I can’t read ‘em,” he told his father, biting his lip in an attempt to keep the disappointment in.

But his father was not fooled. He sighed, dropping a hand on top of his boy’s head and ruffling his hair. “In spring, we’d go to the scribe and ask him ta read it fer you,” he said. He handed the axe over. “But you’ve got ta work a little faster ‘fore we can get enough fees for it.”

Jean Valjean nodded; he understood. Food for his parents, his sister, and himself was more important than satisfying his curiosity.

“I hope I don’t meet ‘em until I get ta know what the words are,” he said. Taking the axe, he swung it back over his shoulder before he started to climb the tree again.

His father snorted. “It took me ten years after I got me words ta meet your Ma,” he said. “You’ve got a whiles ta wait until then, son.”

A few months until spring. Years until he saw the face of the person whose words were now on his skin.

Perhaps he was a fool for thinking it; perhaps he was sentimental for lingering on these thoughts when there’s work to be done and food to be earned. Still, he could not help but keep glancing towards the dark ink nonetheless even as he continued to chop the wood.

He hoped that she was kind. He hoped that she was gentle. He hoped that they could look at each other in the same way his parents looked at each other – with easy love and affection, no matter the suffering that happened.

***

Spring came: the snow melted away, and bare branches grew full again with green leaves that had yet to turn wax-dark with the summer sun. The air was sweeter-smelling, and the village came alive once more when the southerly winds swept away the chill and brought warmth with it. Farmers rejoiced, and woodcutters turned back to tree pruners.

There had been four springs since Jean Valjean’s words came, and he still knew not what they meant.

During the winter of his fourteenth year, his mother fell ill. The chill imprinted itself to her bones and twined into her lungs, and she coughed and coughed for months. The constant steam and lye from her washer-woman’s chores did not help: the water seeped through her nose and filled up her insides, and she died the following year with blood in her mouth.

Any money that could be spared first went to her medicines, then to her funeral.

His father held on for two more years after his soulmate’s death. His frame, always so strong, grew emaciated. He walked like a dead man, and no number of Jean Valjean’s jokes could cheer him. Soon, his arms grew too weak, trunks withering twig-thin. Still, he tried to chop, he tried to prune, until one day, two winters after that when Jean Valjean received his words, he misjudged his strength.

The villagers said: as the shadow of the tree fell across his face, he smiled and did not try to escape; they said he welcomed it with open arms. It was a mercy, the villagers said: a quick death, a quick reunion with the half of his soul he had already lost to the cold, unfeeling earth.

Any money that could be spared went to his funeral. He was buried beside Jean Valjean’s mother, sharing a small tombstone in a tiny churchyard. 

So it was on the eve of his eighteenth spring that Jean Valjean went to live with his older sister and her husband. The day was beautiful, the skies clear and a brilliant lapis-lazuli shade, when he turned away from his parents’ resting place. He walked with his now-broad shoulders tense, his back straight: he was no longer a boy, and so he must pull his weight.

His sister was named Jeanne. She never received her words. Now, standing in this lonely churchyard, she brushed her fingers across stone and thanked God once more for not giving her such a thing.

(Do not think her cruel. She had two small children, and she would not wish to leave them suddenly orphans as her parents did her brother and herself.)

Alveré was her husband’s name, and he worked as a blacksmith’s apprentice. His parents gave him a noble’s name in hope that he would make something of himself in the future. They were farmers, and in his youth, he learned to read.

Now he rested a hand on Jean Valjean’s elbow, stopping him in his tracks. At the same time, his eyes were caught by the boy’s exposed arm – he pulled up the sleeves so he could dig the grave. He saw the words, stark even against the sun- and work-darkened skin, curled against the elbow, and they aroused his curiosity.

“You have a strange set of words on you, boy,” he said, and tried to smile. “The likes of which I’ve never seen.”

Jean Valjean looked at him. He blinked, and cocked his head. “I don’t know what you mean, Monsieur,” he said, calling his brother-in-law with the polite title because he was well-respected in the village despite his lack of a surname. “I’ve never learned what the words are.”

Behind the boy, Jeanne stilled. She knew her brother had words, of course, but she hoped that he would not find the second half of his soul so quickly – she had two small children, and her brother’s hands would be useful in ensuring that they were fed.

She took a step forward to stop her husband, but Alveré was already speaking.

“Get out of there,” he said, his voice pitching higher in some attempt to imitate the boy’s soulmate. His thumb stroked over the skin, skimming over each word as he said them. “24601.”

Jean Valjean blinked. “A number,” he said. His throat threatened to close: he did not know what it meant, but he did not like the sound of it. He did not like the thought of his soulmate, the girl he had dreamed all these years to be good and kind and gentle and sweet, calling him by a number instead of a name.

“A number,” Alveré nodded. He bit his lip, holding back the explanation. He did not want to tell this boy, his brother in the eyes of the law and Alveré’s own heart, that only convicts were called by their numbers. He did not want to suggest that this boy, with his skin stretched too tightly over his bones despite the evident strength in his broad hands and long fingers, would one day be branded and shackled, his father-won name taken from him and replaced with a number.

“Maybe it is only a jest,” he said, and tried to smile. “Perhaps she would be simply be part of a group of friends, one of whom you have never met, and it would be a nickname.”

Jean Valjean looked at his brother-in-law. His eyes cast down, and his thumb stroked over the number etched deep into his skin. A jest. Could he believe in such a thing?

Before he could say a word, or even think of what to reply, Jeanne’s hand tugged her husband away from her brother.

“Don’t go putting ideas inta his head now, Alveré,” she said, voice dry. “You’re going ta get him dreaming, and he’s already got bad enough a habit of tha’.”

She turned around. A hand grabbed onto Jean Valjean’s chin, tugging him down until his eyes met hers, as was her custom ever since he shot up like a young sapling and towered over hers by a head’s length.

“Listen now, Jean,” she said. “This soulmate of yours, you’d meet her whenever God says tha’ you’d, so there’s no point thinking ‘bout it now.” She shook her head.

“Not when we’ve got work ta do, and children ta feed.”

Jean Valjean nodded. There was little else to do when his sister was speaking to him this way. He tugged down his sleeve until the words were covered again.

“Yes, Jeanne,” he said, bowing his head.

Jeanne looked at him for a moment more, eyes narrowing. Behind her, Alveré bit back a sigh: he was relieved despite himself, for now he would not have to be the one to explain to Jean Valjean what it meant for his soulmate to call him by a number instead of a name. He could only hope that his words were prophetic: that it was truly a jest instead of a false hope given to a boy.

After a moment, the three of them started walking again. Jean Valjean followed his sister and his brother-in-law, but while his feet moved, his head turned back towards the shared tombstone of his mother and father once more.

He witnessed the love they shared all of his life, and it tugged at something within him. He wanted something like that. He wanted to make someone laugh – loud and hearty and free – the way his father used to make his mother laugh, even when she was at her deathbed. He wanted to ease the crease out of someone’s scowl with just a touch the way his mother could do his father. Even though he knew that the death of one soulmate meant the death of the other, he still… he still wanted.

So he closed his eyes and allowed himself to dream, if only for a moment. The sweet, gentle girl – faceless, for he dared not try to imagine her face in fear that he would be disappointed or, worse still, be unable to recognise her once he met her – disappeared, replaced by one who was bolder. She laughed amongst a group of friends – faceless, too, for Jean Valjean did not know what it meant to have friends – and jibed him, calling him by a number.

When the number fell from her lips, he would laugh too. He would catch her in his arms, and say the words that were surely inked on her skin by now, and they would look at each other and they would love.

Yes, Jean Valjean decided. Yes, he could believe that the number was a jest. 

He would believe in that. He would try his best.

***

It was winter once more, during a time when tree pruners could find no work for gardens slept beneath their heavy blankets of snow.

A few months ago, in midsummer, the forest between the borders of Faverolles and Auriac was gifted from the King to one of his favoured nobles. Tree pruners could not become woodcutters now, for woodcutters had nowhere to go. The villagers of Faverolles no longer had cheap wood to buy either: the winter was the coldest many had experienced in years. 

One signature, one smile, and the King’s bejewelled hand swept all away and left only death-chill in its wake. 

Alveré Valjean, husband to a wife from whom he took his name, father to seven children, was dead. He was murdered returning home from business in Montdidier. The bandits were caught and hung, but the sight of their lifeless bodies swinging from the nooses on the scaffold could not breathe life back to him.

Jean Valjean avoided the gazes of those shivering by the roadside, huddled by the walls of houses, under awnings in a desperate attempt to avoid the snow. The night was full-dark – the crescent overhead gave little light, and the stars were shadowed by clouds – but their eyes glowed nonetheless. 

Desperation, vague hatred, and even vaguer hope could turn eyes into candles.

He tucked his gun further beneath his coat, and hid along with it the one rabbit and three squirrels he had managed to kill.

The rabbit would be sold in the market in the morning – surreptitiously, avoiding the vigilant eyes of the policemen – and the squirrels would be dinner for his sister’s seven children for the next few nights, cooked into stew with some vegetables and oats left from the autumn harvest.

“I’m home, Jeanne,” he called when he stepped into the house. He forced himself to not look back to the people lingering on the streets without homes to go back to – nine mouths were already too many to feed, and they could not afford more.

Jeanne looked up from where she was putting a heavy kettle on the stove. She had a baby strapped to her back, and her eyes were deep-lined with exhaustion. But her every step still had weight, her every movement purpose: she did not move like the dead.

“Give me your coat and shirt,” she said briskly, holding her arm out towards them. “We’d have to clean the blood off of them before anyone sees.”

He nodded, and decided to not mention the people on the streets outside. His sister would only be angry with him, he knew, and she had too much to worry about lately.

“The policemen are on patrol still,” he said quietly as he sat down on the table. Little Alvery, the eldest of the children, sat an empty bowl in front of him along with a wooden spoon. He placed a hand on top of her head, and she gave him a small, shy little smile before scuttling away back to sweeping the floor.

Jean Valjean remembered a time when the children smiled wider, brighter; when the light in their eyes could outshine the sun itself. They would run around outside, and though the hands of the oldest few were already roughened by the chores they had to do, the skin was smoothed out by their father’s gentle love and their mother’s harsher affections.

He had not seen their smiles in months. He had not heard their laughter. Not since the day when Alveré came back lying in a sheet instead of standing proud. (A sheet, for they were too poor to pay for a proper box, and Jeanne was already a practical woman.

“What good would a box do him now?” she said, her eyes dry. “The money’d be better served used ta feed our children.”

She handed her brother a handkerchief. She held her oldest child, the one named after her husband, tight against her side. She knew without having to be told that he was shedding the tears she could not shed.

He was her husband. He was not her soulmate. She must live on. She must swallow her grief. She must live on. Seven children becoming orphans meant nine corpses instead of just two. Her brother would be destroyed by his efforts to raise them all on their own.

She must live on.)

When dinner was served, Jeanne gave the best parts of the squirrel her brother shot to her children. There was little broth in his bowl as well – the blood-thickened liquid was given most to the second-youngest, who had just been weaned.

Jean Valjean did not complain. He rolled up his sleeves without looking at his words. He ate.

“It’s been a dozen years since you’ve gotten your words, isn’t it?” Jeanne said once the dishes had been cleared and the children put to bed. Her hands, even more callused now, were still busy as she took the seams out of her second daughter’s dress to give it to her oldest son as a shirt.

“Aye,” Jean Valjean said. He looked down at the words, his fingers trailing over them. He still could not read, not properly, but he could read these now.

_Get out of there, 24601!_

His eyes lifted. He turned towards the door. There were still people outside there, on the streets. Perhaps, during the night, they would have frozen to death. There was nothing he could do about it, he told himself. The stew was gone; there weren’t enough blankets; the house was cramped enough with nine bodies.

Slowly, his mind shifted. His eyes saw further even through the wall. He looked at the village now, the edges of it a little blurred at the corners of his eyes. He looked at the village and his eyes found the bakery. 

“Don’t go away looking for your soulmate so soon,” Jeanne was telling him. Her eyes squinted in the flickering candle’s light – the fire had been extinguished the moment the food had been cooked – as she made another stitch. “We still need you here.”

Alveré had told him that his soulmate would have meant the number to be in jest. But Alveré was dead now, and his comforting little lies buried with him. Jean Valjean saw the convicts as they were captured and chained, and he heard about what would’ve been done to them if they had not been put to death.

He knew what the number meant.

Closing his eyes, he stood up from his chair. Slowly, he walked over to his sister’s children, the nieces and nephews who might as well be his own. They were sleeping together in a pile, all of the blankets and clothes in the house thrown over them for warmth. Jean Valjean reached out, and stroked over their heads, one by one.

Then he walked to his sister. He took the youngest from where he was dozing on Jeanne’s back. The infant snuffled and fussed a little at being moved, his eyes – Alveré’s eyes – opening. The uncle-turned-almost-father rocked him gently back to sleep.

His lips curved upwards. He did not know if it was a smile.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

Jeanne nodded. There was a cautious relief in her eyes. Jean Valjean pulled his lips up a little higher.

But his eyes shifted away from her to the door once more. He saw the bakery. He saw the bread that would be thrown out in the morning because it had grown too stale to sell.

He pushed the thought away, and rocked the baby in his arms a little more.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

Not yet.

Perhaps prison wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if he was meant to meet his soulmate there.

***

The collar had grown into a familiar weight around his neck. For the past weeks, it had directed him like a firm hand – forward, always forward. 

He was beginning to forget how walking felt like without the weight of chains on his ankles.

It was a loaf of bread. It was a loaf of bread that was almost too stale to eat. The baby was crying. He was barely a year old, and he was crying because his mother’s milk had dried up and he did not have anything to eat. There was no food left: Jean Valjean had found no work that day, and policemen had begun to guard the forests that winter, so there were no squirrels or rabbits to be shot and eaten or sold.

There was no food left and his sister’s son was dying. Jeanne had tears in her eyes and she had never cried.  
 _  
Surely it will not be so terrible_ , Jean Valjean told himself. The prison of Toulon loomed in front of him. It had high stone walls and small windows without glass and crossed with bars.

_Whoever she is, she will be kind_ , he thought. Perhaps it would be a relative of one of the inmates. Perhaps she would still be laughing as she told him to get out of there. Perhaps he was playing a sort of game with her, a small relief during the drudgery of work – for surely prison would have work for him – and through that he would find something, some _one_ , who could set his heart at ease and make his soul sing with joy.

He held onto the thought. He closed his eyes and tried to shut his ears to the cries and moans of men. He held his breath as the stench of burning flesh reached his nose. He tried to imagine what her laughter would sound like. He tried to imagine the scent of her skin.

Like the sea. It would be like the sea. She would be one of those who lived around here all of her life; perhaps as a laundress of the guards. He always liked the smell of the sea. Even here, in this enclosed room that suffocated with its echoing grief and pain that only seemed to grow and never abate, the scent of the sea breeze through the small window was almost sweet.

Her hands would be rough, as rough as his sister’s.

( _What have you done?!_ Jeanne had railed at him, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him while he stared at her blankly. _What have you done?_

_Please, sir,_ she pleaded with the guards. _Please, sir, he stole for my son. Only for my son. He’s just a tree pruner, sir. We have seven children to feed, sir, and I can’t do it without him. Please, sir_.

Jeanne had fallen to her knees. She placed her forehead to the ground, all of her usual stiff-backed pride gone. The guards only laughed, and kicked the snow-soaked mud all over her dress, her hair, her face.)

She would have a laundress’s squinted eyes, but the colour would be a beautiful pale blue, like the skies during a cloudless spring day. 

(When Jeanne pushed herself up again, her eyes were cold, brittle steel upon her brother’s face. Jean Valjean could do nothing. 

It was only later that the words sank into him. As they welded the collar to his neck, he found himself weeping. _I was a tree pruner in Faverolles,_ he said, over and over. His hands tried to find the ghosts of his sister’s children, but they were already gone. He begged for forgiveness from those who would never give it to him. He begged for forgiveness from a woman who could not hear and would never hear him. Not ever again.

Months had passed since he left the village. What had happened to the children? What happened to the youngest, the one with his father’s eyes?

Would he ever find out? What would he have left, after his five years in prison?)

A guard dragged him forward. He did not resist even when they took his shirt from him. He did not even open his eyes, trying to hold onto the sight of the laughing blue ones hovering right ahead of him.

Perhaps, perhaps… He heard laughter. Unbidden, he found himself looking.

One of the guards was bent over, his hand gripping onto Jean Valjean’s wrist hard enough to dig in between the thin, tiny bones there. He pointed at the words on the inside of his elbow before he laughed again.

“Oh, this one came with a predestined number!” another said. He threw his head back and laughed. The sound of it echoed, filling the space around them, filling the air until Jean Valjean’s very breath seemed to be saturated with their mockery.

“It has been a while since we’ve had one like that,” the first guard said. He panted, trying to catch his breath. Turning, he grinned at Jean Valjean.

“We’ve best keep a lookout on you,” he said. “Seems like you’re destined to be a convict, eh?”

Jean Valjean shook his head. “No,” he said in a dull, weak voice. It reminded him of a squeaking squirrel right after he shot it. “No. I’m a tree pruner from Faverolles.”

He swallowed. “I’m a tree pruner from Faverolles.”

“A northern thief is still a thief,” the second guard snorted. He picked up the brand. Jean Valjean’s eyes moved towards it. On the metal, he could see:

_24601_.

Hands gripped tight onto his shoulder, shoving him into the chair. They held him down. He struggled without knowing why.

“I’m a tree pruner from Faverolles,” he said again.

Fire on his chest. Flames touching, scorching, devouring. He gritted his teeth and tried not to scream.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Pale blue eyes the colour of a cloudless spring sky… 

Laughter surrounded him.

Pale blue eyes the colour…

Hands pressed him harder into the chair. There were words in his throat: they were gone now, burnt, nothing more than curling wisps smelling like singed hair.

The colour of…

Flames lifted, left. He was bereft. He tried to breathe. There was an aching hollow in his chest. The brand had reached through his ribs, and his heart was naught but ash.

When he opened his eyes, all he could see was red.


	2. Javert

Winter; a prison cell. The chill seeped through the wood; there was ice on the ground. The thin walls did not block the winds. Through the high windows, one could see barely see the skies amidst the cloudless black sky. If one concentrated, one could hear the sound of the crashing waves, and smell the thick salt of the sea.

A woman screamed in pain.

“One last push, dearie,” the midwife said. She had been hired just a few days before, after this woman had been arrested and shoved into this cold cell. 

“You’ll have your boy soon,” she coaxed. Her hand clenched around the small one. The woman – barely a girl –would be beautiful if not for the uneven flush on her cheeks, the sweat that plastered her hair to her face, and the dark tones of her skin. She was a _gitana_ , the midwife knew, but she had lived too long to not realise that all labouring women were the same in the end.

She screamed again, gritting her teeth as she bore down. The child slipped from her, and the midwife pulled her hand away, deftly catching the little thing before he could feel too much of the cold. She had spread a blanket, but it was a ragged thing made of straw, and too rough for any infant. Even a convict’s child.

The boy – and it was a boy, she was right, as always – was crying his little lungs out. Like all babies, his head was a little squashed, and he was covered in blood. The midwife cut the umbilical cord and cleaned him off with a couple of rags she had brought with her – rags she had provided after being promised a higher fee that she knew would be added to the woman’s debt.

“Oh, look at that,” she said, eyes widening.

Her hands stilled midway through swaddling the boy. There, right beneath his jaw, she could see a dark patch. She laughed, tightening the largest clean rag around the tiny body.

“He’s got a soulmate’s mark,” she said, offering the child to his mother. 

The woman looked at her. She grimaced through the afterbirth, but her hands were reaching out for the child she had laboured hours for.

“I can’t see it,” she said. Her French was lilted, the accent strange-sounding. But the wonder and awe in her large, dark eyes was familiar, at least.

Smiling, the midwife helped the girl tuck her child against the crook of her elbow. When the boy was fully settled, she shifted the rag down to expose his neck.

“There,” she said. “You can’t read it yet, but he’s born with his mark. That’s a rare thing, you know?”

The woman – the _mother_ now – smiled. It was a small, tremulous thing. Her thumb brushed against the weak, tiny throat.

“It’s too small to be read,” she said, sounding disappointed.

“Aye,” the midwife nodded. “It’ll take a few years more, at least. But…”

She rested her hand on top of the woman’s. “We Christians believe that children born with their marks mean that they have a very strong bond with their soulmates,” she said. “Your son is born marked, dearie. He’ll be loved, that’s for sure.”

The mother closed her eyes. She pressed her mouth against the top of her child’s tiny head.

“Sometimes,” she said, and there was something terribly broken in her voice. “Sometimes, to be loved is a curse instead of a blessing.”

The midwife wanted to refute that. Love, after all, was the greatest gift God had given his Creation. But she swallowed back the words, for she could see, out of the corner of her eyes: words written on woman’s calf, curving down to her ankle:

_If you tell my fortune, darling, will it say that you’d be mine?_

She was married to a man who, the midwife heard, had been arrested a few months back for smuggling. He was already in the prison just a couple of miles out, wearing the green cap of a lifer.

The midwife wanted to say: “If you loved your man, you should’ve stopped him from smuggling.” But she stilled her tongue, for the girl-turned-mother was now humming to her child, rocking on the cold, barely-blanketed ground as she fed her child.

Those words were too cruel.

Instead, she patted the woman’s hand again, and brushed the back of her hand over the boy’s cheek.

“I’ll show myself out, dearie,” she said.

The woman looked up at her. She nodded, barely realising that she was still there.

“Do you want me to take that,” she motioned towards the afterbirth, “before I go?”

“No,” the woman said. She smiled, pressing her lips to her child’s head again. “I’d bury it. It’ll… it’ll be an offering. For his life to be good.” She closed her eyes. “For his soulmate to be good.”

“Alright,” the midwife said.

As she left, she took one last glance backwards: the child with words on his neck, a dark patch like a collar on his newborn flesh; the mother, marked with words on her legs, like trailing chains.

She closed the door of the cell, and went to ask for her payment.

***

“Riezo!” A woman’s voice echoed across the small, ramshackle hut. She took three steps forward, grabbing a small child’s scarf off a hook on the wall before falling to her knees.

Her son – with his father’s pale eyes and her dark skin – scowled as much as his little four-year-old face could manage. “It’s hot out there today, Mama,” he said, turning his head away. “I don’t want to wear it.”

“You must,” his mother said firmly. She reached out and wrapped the scarf firmly around his neck, covering the dark ink on the skin. 

The contents were not the reason why she insisted on him hiding it.

Tugging on the scarf, the boy’s scowl deepened. He looked down at the floor for a moment before meeting his mother’s eyes again. His tiny, chubby hands pulled the scarf away until the cloth draped loosely around his shoulders.

“Why do you want me to hide my words, Mama?” he asked.

She froze. “How do you know about your words?”

Riezo Javert, named by one of the elders here at the Roma camp near the town of Toulon, several miles away from the prison where the boy’s father was and with a surname that his mother was not sure if he was allowed by law to use, looked at his mother with as sceptical a look as his age could allow.

“I saw them on a puddle,” he told her, shrugging.

His mother knew he was telling the truth: her son had never lied. Her son seemed incapable of even thinking of lying.

“Do you know what they say?” she asked, quietly.

His scowl deepened. He shook his head. “I can’t read, Mama,” he said pointedly. He seemed to blame her for that.

She sighed, shaking her head: she knew it was her fault, for she couldn’t read either, especially not the language that these particular words were in. But that was not her point.

Reaching out, she tugged the scarf free entirely, holding the strip of material in her hands. Gently, she splayed her hand over his small chest, reaching upwards until the tips of her fingers were tickling against the ink-stained skin of his neck.

Throughout the past years as he grew, the words had spread out, becoming more and more recognisable. She cried the very first time she saw them. Not because the ink spread from one side of his neck to another but…

“It’s in French, Riezo,” she told him quietly. “Your words are in French.”

He cocked his head. “So?” he asked, clearly uncomprehending. “Everyone speaks French around here.”

“No,” she said. “Not us.”

Her hand spread outwards, encompassing the little hut, encompassing the camp itself and drawing a line around it to separate it from the rest of the world. 

“The person you’re destined for isn’t from here, Riezo,” she continued. “Whoever she is, she’ll be outside of the camp. Outside of… outside of _us_.”

Riezo blinked. “Oh,” he said. His chubby fingers brushed over his own neck, and his scowl deepened even further, turning into a frown. His mother simply waited, allowing him to think – her son was clever, perhaps cleverer than she ever thought he might be. It was a miracle 

He dropped down to sit on the dirt ground. His hand tugged at the hem of her loose, baggy trousers. “Can I see your words, Mama?”

She nodded. Shifting until her legs were spread out around his smaller body, she pulled him close until she was holding him, and he could grab onto her ankle. He tugged up the cloth, poking at the clear, dark ink with a fingertip.

“Your father spoke French to me the first time we met,” she said, leaning down to kiss the top of his head. Her eyes, unbidden by her mind, had moved away from him, turning westward – towards the sea, towards the prison.

“He never learned how to speak like one of us,” she continued, stroking his soft hair. “He tried to learn, but his accent was…” she laughed quietly. 

Her son’s eyes fixed upon her, eyes widening – he rarely heard any tales of his father, and it was rarer yet for him to hear his mother laugh.

Shaking her head, she continued, “He didn’t get to learn properly before he was taken away.”

“Why was he taken away?” Riezo asked, his large, pale blue eyes – his father’s eyes – blinking up towards her.

She smiled. “He did not want me to remain a poor man’s wife,” she said. “He said that I deserved more than to have to live poor just because he couldn’t do well enough for me. He wanted to make lot of money so I… so _we_ could all live in comfort.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” her son complained. “Why would he be taken away because of that?”

Kissing the top of his head again, she closed her eyes. “You’ll understand one day when you’re older,” she said. Even as the words left her, she hoped that he would understand, at the same time, that his father was not a bad person for wanting to do what he wanted.

Love was a terrible curse sometimes.

Riezo scowled again. “You always say that,” he complained. When she smiled, he huffed, turning away.

“This doesn’t explain why my words being in French is bad, Mama.”

His mother sighed. “The camp turned me away when they realised that I’ve chosen someone outside of us,” she told him quietly. “They only allowed me to come back because I had nowhere else to go.”

He didn’t remember it – he was too young – but she had cried and begged and lingered at the edges of the camp for days. She had held onto her little son, trying to dry her tears with his hair. It took the elders days and many women’s pity before she was allowed back in again, and only under the condition that she earned her own living.

If anyone outside here knew that Riezo’s words were in French, he would be thrown out just like she had been. She would go with him, of course, but a woman with a son without a husband would find it difficult to make a living. Much less a woman in France with a skin colour like hers.

Riezo’s little finger tugged at the cord at her ankle, making the bells jingle. Their soft chimes echo around them. “That’s not fair,” he said. He looked up at her. “It’s not your fault that my words are in French.”

“It’s not your fault either,” his mother told him.

The boy fell silent for such a long moment that his moment wondered if he had fallen asleep. She tilted her head until she could look him in the face. His eyes were focused into such a strange distance, and he chewed his lip as if his mind was caught by a sudden idea.

She swallowed down her trepidation. Instead, she ruffled his hair. “Riezo?”

He blinked. Slowly, his eyes focused back on her. She opened her mouth, but before she could speak, he was already jumping to his feet.

“I’m going outside to play, Mama,” he declared. He gave her a smile that looked strange around the edges.

When she tried to catch his hand, he danced out of her grasp with a gazelle’s grace that reminded her achingly of her own. His smile widened further, and now it just looked odd, and there was too-familiar darkness in his eyes. A darkness that she had never wished for him to feel.

He picked up the scarf and swung it over his shoulders. The cloth covered the whole of his neck. He left the hut.

Her fingers closed around nothingness. Even the trailing ends of the scarf slipped from her.

As the door shut behind her son’s small figure, she caught a glimpse of ink-darkened skin at the sides of his neck. She swallowed.

Was there truly a collar around her son’s neck?

Had she placed it there herself, with her careless words?

***

She never knew the answer to her question. It was only six years later that the little boy grew into a slightly taller boy and casted away his name, becoming only ‘Javert’ because a convict’s surname was better than a name given to him by _gitan_.

He was not thrown out of the camp. He walked away himself. Sometimes, remembering his retreating figure that paid no heed to her cries for him to return, she wondered if he did that because his pride, already strong at ten-years-old, found it a better option to leave than to wait to be thrown out.

Or was it that he realised that he was surviving on the pebbles of pity granted to him by others, and he found starvation easier to swallow? She lingered upon the questions for years, and the darkness of it was like another chain on her ankles, dragging her down and down into the cold earth.

On the same year his mother died, away from him in a place he had renounced and severed all of his care for, the boy Javert was living in the town of Toulon. He was a familiar sight on the streets, immediately recognisable: a boy with too-pale eyes and too-dark skin, always with a ragged scarf on his neck that seemed a little too small for him.

“He’s too poor to buy a new one,” a young woman sighed, a small frown marring her beautiful features. She toyed with the ribbon of her bonnet. “I should give him something.”

“Don’t go near him,” her fiancé replied. His gold buttons shone in the bright winter sun. “You don’t know his ilk and what sort of diseases he might be carrying.”

When she opened her mouth to protest, he hooked her arm into his and tugged her away. “Besides, look at his shoulders,” he jerked his head. “He’s too proud to accept charity anyway.”

The boy, all of twelve years old, eyed them with narrowed eyes and a frame so stiff and thin that it seemed to be in danger of snapping at the next sea breeze. He crossed his arms. His fingers tugged at the frayed edges of his scarf, wrapping it even tighter around his always-covered neck.

The young woman sighed. She put her purse away. “You’re right,” she said, and allowed herself to be led away.

There was no need to listen to what they said, he knew. He had heard it all before; he knew, too, that they were right. His very appearance condemned him, and so he must push himself even harder to prove himself worthy.

And he had been proving himself. This winter was already better than the last – he had enough for food for the rest of the week if he ate a meal a day. If he continued serving as messenger between the prison and the main police station of Toulon – a trek even most horses refused to take due to the slipperiness of the ground – then he would have enough for the next week as well.

Winters were better for work. Messenger boys were needed more then, and there was a greater need, for there were few gamins on the streets who were daring enough to make the two-mile long trek towards the prison complex. In the cold, he had no need to depend on the charity of others, and he could make an honest living.

(His living was honest. It had to be.)

So it was on this morning while the skies were clear and cruel blue that the boy Javert was walking through the streets of the town of Toulon, his face half-hidden in the too-small scarf with his eyes – the same shade as the current cloudlessness overhead – peeking over it. He held it over his mouth, breathing through it so he would not lose too much warmth or water through the air – they were hard-won, after all.

He was only a few feet from the police station when a hand shoved at his shoulder hard enough to make him skitter across the slippery ground. He fell sideways, catching himself with an elbow slamming against the cold hardness. His eyes flashed.

Boys surrounded him – all older, larger, and better-fed. They laughed at the sight of him. The sound of their voices reminded Javert of the cawing of crows around the camp. He pushed the memory away.

“What do you want?” he asked brusquely. He had unlearned sweetness and softness years ago, turning his outer skin into spikes like a porcupine’s.

The boys laughed again. “Come on, gypsy boy,” one said, kicking at his knee. Javert dodged. “Speak a few words for us, eh?”

They laughed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. His consonants were sharp and crisp – learned and long-practiced from the few times he had heard the officers and rich men spoke around town, divorced from the low drawl of the Roma-accent. “Why don’t you all mind your own business?”

“Our business is you this morning,” another said. He’s taller and bigger than the rest and, standing there surrounded by the other boys, he seemed a miniature kingpin surrounded by his troops. He jammed his fists onto his hips.

“What’re you hiding behind that scarf of yours?”

Javert dodged their hands immediately as they grabbed him. But there were too many hands, and he had not eaten that morning. One mistake, and they managed to hold onto him by the shoulders. He struggled hard, trying to bite, but these were boys who had fought him before and they learned quickly in this if not in nothing else: the one holding onto his scarf pulled, choking him until he clawed at them and could not bring himself to bite down even when a hand was close to his mouth.

So he was caught, angry and helpless, in their grasp as they pulled away the scarf.

“Knew it!” the ringleader said triumphantly. “Knew he had words under there. Now we’d see how gypsy words look like!”

The boy Javert growled when a hand grabbed onto his too-long hair, pulling backwards. He struggled again, driving an elbow into ribs. He heard a yelp, but there was a quick scrambling and he was caught again and forced to bear his throat.

“Awww, damn.” The cries rang out. “It’s in _French_.”

_Of course they are,_ he wanted to growl at them, the words already heavy on his tongue. _Why else do you think I’d be here instead of the camp?_

But he swallowed them back. He would show no weakness. He would show them nothing about himself that was not already written in his skin and eyes and which he could not help.

“But hey, look at what’s written!” the oldest boy said. Javert’s breath tripped over his throat. He tried to steady his breathing.

(He still could not read – it was one of the reasons why he was trusted as messenger.)

The boy laughed cruelly. “‘ _Let me go, damn you!_ ’” The laughter rang out even louder, sharper. “Look at you! You’re so unwanted that even your soulmate doesn’t want you!”

As the hilarity grew around him, Javert saw his chance: he drove an elbow behind him, slammed his head forward, and rolled away when the grips on his shoulders loosened. He snatched the scarf out of the oldest boy’s grasp, holding it in his hands as he stared defiantly at these well-fed, pale-skinned boys who had been given everything that Javert had to fight for throughout his life.

“That’s fine with me,” he said through gritted teeth. “Then they won’t bother me when I have no need for them.”

Halfway through lunging for him, the boys froze. They stared at him.

“You don’t _want_ your soulmate?” one of them managed to say. His eyes were comically wide.

Javert smirked. He draped his scarf back over his shoulders, winding it around his neck.

“No,” he said. His decision had already been made; to know what the words said only confirmed it even more. “What could they do for me? The idea that every person with a mark is only half a person is lie – no soulmate in the world could earn you respectability.”

He nodded towards the guard standing at the door of the police station. The man stared down at him, his dark eyes slightly wide, but Javert ignored him (like how he had ignored the scuffle happening just a few feet away from his post) and went inside the police station.

There was nothing a soulmate could do for him, he decided. He quashed down the tiny hope he had been holding on that someday there would be a person who would look at him and not find his skin too dark, or his eyes too pale; that there would be a pair of eyes who would not find him wanting.

Once, Javert had someone like that; he had his mother. He walked away from her of his own will, because he knew even at ten-years-old that such a relation, such… acceptance, would only taint him and make him unworthy of respectability.

Respectability was everything. To be respectable meant that no one would ever find the need to look down their noses at him; respectability meant that he had earned the right to look people in the eye without having to see past their nostril hairs. 

“Excuse me, sir,” he sketched a deep bow towards the Prefect of the police in Toulon. “Do you have any jobs for me today?”

Besides, he had no time to think about soulmates when he had to worry about having enough money for food to last him through the winter. It was better this way that any soulmate he might meet in the future would want his existence as little as he wanted theirs.

***

At sixteen years old, Javert – no longer Riezo, never again Riezo – had grown too tall for most to be able to look down their noses at him.

They cast him askance glances out of the corner of their eyes instead.

It was natural, he knew. Respectability was a hard-earned thing for one such as he, and he had to work hard for it. He had worked hard for the past six years, and now he had finally earned enough trust.

The uniform of the prison guards of Toulon was made of cheap, rough cloth dyed a dark blue. It had a high collar along with a standard-issue leather stock. 

Javert looked at himself in the mirror. He was already dressed, but his neck was still bared.

Carefully, he wrapped the leather stock around his throat and buckled it, shifting the metal around to the back of his neck. Then he draped the collar over and buttoned that as well. Next, his little addition to the uniform, a further step up towards respectability: he tied the black linen cravat over the collar, tying it into a functional, unostentatious square knot. 

Three layers pressed against his throat. The weight was nearly enough to choke. Javert spread out his hand over his neck. The space between his thumb and his middle finger was where the words were. But now, only he knew.

The thought was reassuring. No one would ever see the sign of a claim on him. Without such eyes, there would be no claim. 

He made a note to himself to learn how to dress in darkness – for practicality, of course: guards were only issued one candle every fortnight. He picked up his new truncheon, the wood shining with polish and the same colour as the almost-buried leather stock, and headed out for his first day at work.

Waves crashed against the high walls of the shipyard. The ship lilted to one side. Guards yelled; the sounds of wood against flesh. Prisoners groaned, muscles straining. The ship righted itself. Javert stepped up to the high wall, looking around. He found the man who gave him the uniform almost immediately, and headed towards him.

“M. Thierry,” he stood at attention, looking ahead.

The older man – with grey in his hair and deep-etched lines around his eyes and mouth – glanced over at him. “Who are you?”

“Javert, sir.”

“Oh,” M. Thierry said, sounding surprised. He laughed, crow’s feet spreading even further over his eyes. “Well, you look very different when you’re properly cleaned and dressed, eh?”

He slapped Javert on the shoulder. Javert gritted his teeth and shoved back the instinctive urge to flinch, or move away.

M. Thierry, luckily, did not notice his discomfort. His eyes had already turned back to the columns of grunting convicts as they tried to pull in the great ship that had been taken in for repairs.

“You’ve got some luck today, Javert,” he said. “Your first day, and all of our dangerous ones are right out there for you to look at.”

Javert bit the inside of his cheek and swallowed down his response: it was not luck but obedience – it was M. Thierry himself who told him to report to work on this particular morning.

“What makes these men so dangerous, sir?” he asked instead.

The older man gave him another startled look. “Hah,” he said softly. “It’s been a few years since anyone has asked that particular question.”

Before Javert could reply – or apologise as he clearly should – M. Thierry set his hands down on top of the parapet, his sharp, dark eyes cast towards the open sea and the rows of men in red rags.

“A variety of reasons.” He paused. The sounds of the crashing waves and the continuous groans of men at work filled the silence between them. Javert stood straighter, his hands stubbornly remaining uncurled by his side.

“There are those who are dangerous from the moment they come in, of course,” M. Thierry continued. “The murderers and the burglars. The ones who escaped capture a few times. The ones who come in with great malice in their eyes for the entire world.”

He shrugged slightly.. “Then there are those who proved to be dangerous in the bagne itself, no matter how much we tried to beat resistance out of them. Men with cunning so sharp that they’re able to convince others to revolt. Men who try to escape.” His eyes scanned the columns again. “Or those over there.”

Reaching out, he touched Javert on the elbow. “Look over there.”

Forcing down another flinch, Javert obeyed the silent command to turn. 

“The first man in the third column. Do you see him?”

Javert took another step closer to the parapet. He saw a man with a ragged beard and close-cropped hair half-hidden beneath a red cap, dressed in a tattered vest and smock that was a in a red duller than the cap. This far away, his face was nothing but a blur: he looked the same as any other man.

(There was no urge within him to look further. He knew that the man who sired him was already dead. Some sort of fall four years ago; his body was already dumped into the ocean.)

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“That’s 24601, Javert,” M. Thierry told him. “He was arrested three years ago for theft and housebreaking. He was meant to serve five years, but now he has to serve eight.” His lips curved upwards slightly as he glanced over to Javert.

“He tried to escape, you see.”

“Ah.” Instinctively, Javert found himself disliking this figure he could barely see: this 24601 was a fool at best and a habitual criminal at worst, for surely there was no other reason why anyone would wish to try to escape prison when they never succeeded and risked extending their sentences when they were re-captured.

“You keep a sharp eye on him,” M. Thierry continued. “He’s not just dangerous because he tried to escape. He has a great strength, Javert, greater than anyone I’ve ever seen. Stronger than a bull. The convicts even gave him a nickname for it – Jean-le-Cric.”

“Jean-le-Cric,” Javert repeated. He looked at M. Thierry, and nodded sharply. “I will keep a lookout for him, sir.”

“Best not to use that name,” M. Thierry shook his head. “Using names will give them airs. 24601 will do.”

Another nod. “Yes, sir. I will remember.”

“Good,” M. Thierry said. Javert tried to not let his chest puff up with the praise.

“Now, there’s another one two columns beside him.” M. Thierry took Javert by the elbow, seemingly not noticing the stiffness of the limb, and dragged the younger man further down the parapet, towards the open ocean.

“That’s 27458, Javert,” he said. “The one in the green cap. He was convicted of three counts of murder and one of burglary…”

Later, Javert reflected that his memory was a greater boon than he had thought. It served him well when he was told messages to deliver, and later also when he was first learning to read the law codes. Now, with so many convicts’ numbers to remember, he would need it more than ever.

He stood in front of the mirror again. In the dim light of the moon coming through the small window of his room, he undid the cravat, collar, and leather stock, setting them aside. He did not glance at the words on his neck.

They did not matter. He had a duty to fulfil now, and respectability to earn. Nothing else mattered.


	3. Toulon

Two years as a prison guard had taught Javert this: convicts were nothing more than chained beasts. They might resemble men in the shapes of their bodies, but their eyes were wild and their teeth were usually bared. Many guards had fallen prey to the fangs of convicts, left with bruised skin and broken bones, sometimes covered with blood.

(The convicts ended up with worse injuries, and their sentences lengthened. But that was just, for they deserved it. If there was anything Javert had learned throughout his life, it was that one must earn everything they receive, for that was justice.)

The fight in the dining hall broke out only a few minutes after the convicts’ luncheon – black beans with a hint of meat, the latter because it was Sabbath day. It quickly turned into a riot when Javert tried to stop the fight. 

So Javert did his duty with punches and kicks and thrusts of his cudgel, but, despite his efforts, almost all of the guards being called in to subdue the convicts. Sometime during the fight, he caught a sight out of the corner of his eyes: the frayed hem of a cassock, flashing feet weighed down with shackles and a broken chain trailing behind.

Still, it was three hours later that the riot was finally calmed and all of the convicts who took part in it had their numbers taken. Javert insisted on a headcount of all the convicts in the prison, but he was dismissed out of hand by the other guards until M. Thierry stepped him and handed him the duty to carry out himself.

That, too, was just: Javert had not managed to calm down the initial fight. Besides, his colleagues were tired and many of them were injured.

He found one missing: 24601 was gone. A dangerous man had once more escaped.

M. Thierry assigned him with two other men to hunt 24601 down. Javert accepted the orders – including that he was the lowest in command due to his lack of seniority – and rode out towards the town of Toulon while the heavy bells began to clang behind him, signalling to the townspeople that a convict had escaped.

The search took hours and they were still left empty-handed. Blood was pounding in Javert’s ears: he could not abide failure. He spurred his horse on further – he knew this town better than his senior guards; he knew the little nooks and crannies where one might think to hide, and he searched them all even as the other guards had already slowed him, already close to giving up.

Northwest of the prison, long past Rue Armand, nearing Chemin des Antilles, he heard a sound: a sort of a scuffling like one might hear from a group of rats. Or a convict moving around, trying to hide himself even further. Javert’s eyes narrowed, and he dismounted from his house, tying its reins to a nearby lamppost. He looked back at the guards who followed them, and the most senior of them – M. Bouchard – gave him a shrug.

Javert walked down the street. There, out of the corner of his eyes – a movement. He slipped the cudgel out of his belt.

“Get out of there, 24601!”

There was a sudden stillness. Javert took his chance: he darted forward towards the flash of red he could see in the shadows of the setting sun, and he grabbed hold of the nearest thing he could reach.

It was an arm. 

“Let me go, damn you!”

His throat burned. There were flames in his chest. Javert’s eyes widened, but there was a duty that needed to be done: he tightened his grip further, dug his heels in, and _dragged_ 24601 out into the light.

The convict was covered in dirt and sewer muck from his feet to his knees. So that was where he had been hiding while the guards searched for him. Javert’s lips twisted – it was fitting. He raised his cudgel, aiming for 24601’s collarbone to incapacitate him—

When the blow came, he didn’t expect it: Javert stumbled backwards, wood clattering onto the dirt floor as his head spun from the impact on his jaw. His teeth ached, one tooth threatening to come loose, but he was darting forward again.

“Stop struggling! It would be five years for you now,” he snarled. His hands caught hold of the collar of the cassock, and he twisted the linen until it bit into the convict’s neck.

24601 laughed. “Not if I get free of you,” he said, and his eyes burned with hatred.

His hand swept outwards, threatening to knock Javert off of his feet. _A dangerous man_ , he remembered. _Stronger than a bull_.

Gritting his teeth, his other hand lunged out, claw-like. Nails sunk into 24601’s arm, but the convict shoved away from him with all of his strength.

Cloth tore. Javert tried to step backwards.

Right before the blow hit him, he saw, on the convict’s arm, a cramped, small, and chillingly familiar handwriting:

_Get out of there, 24601!_

It didn’t matter. It _didn’t matter_. He repeated those words over and over in his mind as his face landed in the dirt. This didn’t matter as well – he snatched up his cudgel from where it had fallen, leaping back to his feet.

There was his duty. He had sworn to himself that there would be nothing else but his duty.

The other two guards had rushed in during the scuffle. The convict snarled at them, snarled at Javert, yellowed and uneven teeth terrible in the orange light of sunset. He struggled, his dark eyes glared. But Javert ignored the pounding of his heart even though he could hear nothing else, hands clenching on his cudgel.

24601 was locked in place, his arms held onto by the two guards. He was a pathetic sight: covered in filth, stinking of sewer and sweat, but there was still defiance in the tension of his body and his eyes.

“Why…” 24601 said. “Why did it have to be _you_?”

Javert slammed the cudgel into his face. “It’s my duty,” he said, voice cold enough to freeze his own bones. He slipped the weapon back into his belt.

“It’s easier to transport him back this way, Messieurs,” he told his superiors.

They looked at him. M. Bouchard raised an eyebrow. “24601 seemed to recognise you,” he said, and there was something sly and insinuating in his voice.

“He’s just another convict,” Javert said. At the edge of his hearing, he could hear screaming. Echoing, distorted, as if coming from miles below the ocean. He ignored it.

M. Bouchard looked at 24601 again. His eyes fixed on the words on his arm. “Hah,” he said.

Javert tensed. The man said nothing more, but there was, perhaps, a twist of mirth at the edge of his mouth. The other guard, M. Paget, glanced first at the convict, then back at Javert, and he laughed as if he heard a joke that Javert could not hear.

His hands clenched at his side. After a moment, he forced them to relax again, walking back to his horse and swinging himself upon its back.

If he was laughed at, then it would be nothing more than what he deserved. This was long overdue.

Hadn’t his mother told him that he had to hide the words, for it would bring him shame and pain?

(He had not thought of his mother for years.)

***

Of course his soulmate was a prison guard. _Of course_.

Jean Valjean looked at the words on his elbow.

His nail scraped down the words. His skin reddened, but the ink did not and would never fade. He scraped a handful of muck from his calf, and smeared it over them. 

The filth covered the words, but they were still visible: inked behind his eyelids, engraved into his bones.

Sitting in the small, dark stone cell, his nose filled with the stench of excrement from his own skin, his wrists and ankles held down by heavy shackles that chained him to the wall like an animal, Jean Valjean started to laugh.

With every breath, every echo of the sound that slammed into his eardrums, he felt a hand curl around the remnants of his heart, ripping them, shredding them straight out from his ribs.

There was no blood on his hands. There was no blood in his mouth.

But Jean Valjean bled, nonetheless.

He bled, and he laughed.

***

Standing in his room, Javert removed his uniform. He kept the cravat, collar, and leather stock on.

When he was naked, he stood in front of the mirror. His thin body with its too-dark skin and too-pale eyes stared back at him.

Slowly, he loosened the cravat’s knot. Then he looped the linen again, and pulled it tight, cutting off his air.

He stood there until grey crept into his vision and his lungs screamed for air. For a moment, just a moment, the distant, distorted screams faded, and he could no longer see the words writ on his neck in his mind.

Javert let go. Then he did it again.

That night, he went to sleep with a too-tight cravat, its knot pressing the weight of the collar and leather stock against his throat.

But he dreamed of the convict anyway: dark eyes burning with hated, filth-covered screams, and yellow fangs sharp and gleaming.

He woke with screams in his ears that he knew would never go away.

_End_

**Author's Note:**

> Written in November. Posted during one of those rare times on vacation when I have Internet, energy, and spare time. (I vacation in mountains.)


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